5 Years of Using Our Melons

This month we celebrate our 5th anniversary!

I couldn’t be more proud of how things are going at Creative Mellen. We’ve assembled a great core creative team and have talented and trusted partners that work seamlessly together. We are producing work that’s being recognized both locally and nationally, and we just launched our new website full of our creative work. We continue to be blessed with a great set of clients, from local to regional to national. And we owe it to our clients for allowing us to do what we do best in order to make them successful.

I thought recognizing our five years would be a good time to use this forum to showcase the concepting around Creative Mellen’s own identity. As a designer, developing a name and logo for your own firm can be difficult. But the process of designing Creative Mellen’s identity was essentially the same process we use today for our clients.

With company naming, we take into consideration many factors such as goals, competition, and overall market. We brainstorm all types of names. No ideas are discounted or dismissed; every idea gets written down. While this process can be a long and difficult one, incorporating my own name came to me while simply taking a walk. As you can imagine, nicknames with my last name were pervasive. The universal one of course was “melon head.” For those that don’t know, it’s a slang term for “using your brain.” Since providing strategy-driven creative was the main focus of opening my own firm, it became clear that the name should be “Creative Mellen.” The juxtaposition between my own name and the meaning of the nickname made this a natural fit—something you strive for when naming a company. We apply creativity to many different disciplines including how we approach strategy and solve our clients’ marketing challenges—so the name fit all our criteria.

Compared to naming the company, the logo was a bit more challenging. Like any logo project, I identified the style and sophistication that the company should portray. We wanted to show the creativity of the name and play on words with the professionalism and refinement of our design style. This approach allowed me to explore clean and iconic logomarks. As you will notice with the sketches above, my initial focus was how to incorporate the “mind/brain” into a watermelon logomark. With many variations, I narrowed down the potential favorites to the three shown below.

In the end, it was the style and subtle use of the watermelon slice that appealed to me and others I shared it with. The inventive use of the slice and how it was incorporated into the area of the mind/brain of the head (and the bite out of the slice becomes the ear) communicated the idea of being creative. The logomark itself definitely has meaning regarding my company goals with a little understated creative whimsy. Together, the final name and logomark create an identity that is both meaningful and memorable.

As we embark on our fifth year, we would like to thank all of our clients, supporters, partners, and family. Without their continued support, none of this would be possible. A very special thanks to our very first client Just Dogs Playcare for allowing us to help them revamp their brand and website. We continue that relationship today and hope many more of our clients and partners continue to grow with us too!